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Ton Hammer!

Welcome
to the 1,447th
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style="font-style: italic;">Another
BlizzCon has come and gone, and while many fans may have hoped for more
massive announcements to come out of the ‘con, the experience
was still worth the price of admission for those in attendance.
Managing Editor Reuben “Sardu” Waters recaps the
weekend’s events and tries to survive the journey home today
in
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/loading/2010/oct/25">Loading…
That’s a Wrap.

cellspacing="0" width="100%">

The
Pulse

You vote with what you
view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result
is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/thepulse/">What
is The Pulse?).

Today's
top 5 Pulse results:

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow">World
of Warcraft

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/eq2">EverQuest 2

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/99">Lord
of the Rings Online

Have you got a question about
style="font-style: italic;">Rift:
Planes of Telera?
Well, you have a chance to ask the devs at Trion Worlds directly. Just
submit your questions
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=53660">in
our forums.

To help celebrate the redesign of the Guild Wars 2 forums, Ten Ton
Hammer is having a contest where the winner receives a Guild Wars 2
premium wall graphic from LTL Prints. All you have to do to enter is
post on our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=721">forum.
This contest ends October 26th. For all the contest details, go
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/gw2/contests/ltl-post-a-thon">here.

What's
your PlayerScore? World of
Warcraft players, find out at
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/playerscore">playerscore.com.

Loading... it’s like
a double rainbow, all the way.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Blizzard
put some serious consideration to changing the name of their annual fan
event to something perhaps more descriptive of the actual experience of
attending the event: NinjaCon. That’s honestly the first
thing that came to mind when I sat down to summarize my experiences
over the weekend, but before you begin making wild assumptions about
what I actually mean here, let me explain where I’m coming
from.

10 minutes after you arrive at BlizzCon you feel like you’ve
seen all there is to see at the show, yet somehow by the time you leave
the hall at the end of the day you’re left with the
impression that you’d only experienced 10% of what the
‘con has to offer.

This is, of course, by design. By opting to experience one aspect of
the event you’re more often than not also making the decision
to miss out on something else. In that sense I can see why the Virtual
Ticket and Direct TV feeds have proven to be such popular alternatives.
Then again, as a fan event, the social side of actually being at the
convention center accounts for a major percentage of the fun unless
you’re really just in it for the big announcements, and
unfortunately this year’s BlizzCon was somewhat light in that
department. Still, having access to the
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/diablo3/classes/preview/demonhunter">
style="font-style: italic;">Diablo III
demo or new
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/91099">
style="font-style: italic;">StarCraft II
custom maps more than made up for the lack of earth shatteringly huge
reveals for many fans I spoke to over the weekend.

Your own mileage may vary, but in the grand scheme of things
I’d have to say that BlizzCon is a hardcore group experience.
You can still enjoy it while solo, but since your entire day will be
spent doing one of two things – sitting on your butt or
standing in a line so that you can sit on your butt in a different spot
– the experience gets to a point where it’s only as
enjoyable as the people sharing the local chat channels.

Speaking of sitting on your butt…

Currently I’m sitting on my butt in O’Hare for a
three hour layover between my connecting flights. Apparently the AC is
busted so some brainiac thought it’s a good idea to crank up
the heat instead. I’m fairly certain that at least one person
sitting in this area of the airport is bound to pass out due to heat
exhaustion , just like back in high school when our band director
insisted that we march in parades wearing heavy wool uniforms, even in
110 degree heat.

One year we had no fewer than 12 people pass out along the parade route
before the rest of us simply quit marching and went home. It was one of
those situations where we all looked at each other and said,
“This is insane” before ripping the giant Q-Tip
helmets from our heads and calling it quits. I’m sure the
world got on well enough without hearing a generic high school band
play a half-baked rendition of Uptown Girl or the Ghostbusters theme.
The apocalypse didn’t come that day at any rate, though had
we kept marching I’m fairly certain more than a few of us
would have become zombies.

But that has absolutely nothing to do with BlizzCon. And the following
only has very marginal relation:

The shuttle driver that picked me up from the airport and drove me to
my hotel prior to the event turned out to be
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQFGlBKARos">this
guy, I kid you not.
All the food is poison indeed – oddly enough that’s
exactly what I was thinking while stomping around the airport a few
minutes ago trying to decide what to have for dinner since most servers
in the Airport MMOG seem to be really pushing the microtransaction
angle these days.

Once you pay for the core gameplay experience (cleverly called a
“ticket”) most servers will nickel and dime you for
simple things we’d normally take for granted. Everything from
extra inventory space to food and drink comes with a price tag on most
of Airport’s servers. Now, if they’d add in some
increased flight speed potions I’d be all for it, but
unfortunately those haven’t made it onto the item shop as of
yet.

Before I completely derail my BlizzCon post-mortem any further,
we’ve added an awesome new teleportation device that will
instantly take you to our BlizzCon 2010 event portal. It works very
similar to what’s commonly referred to as map travel, only in
this case you can click
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/blizzcon/2010">this
shiny link to be taken directly
to your destination. Once there, you may even want to
bookmark the page as we’ll have even more BlizzCon goodness
blasting onto the ‘net this week including hands-on
impressions of
style="font-style: italic;">D3’s
demon hunter and the new
style="font-style: italic;">SC2
custom maps, an exclusive
style="font-style: italic;">WoW
interview and more.

If you’ve made it this far, then I have to thank you for
bearing with my seemingly directionless Blizz babble today. Broken
electronics on one plane, and lightning preventing the replacement from
taking off turned what might have been a simple journey home into an
exceedingly long experience. So if I’m rambling on a bit more
than usual, I’ll just chalk it up to getting home at 4am
after one heck of a long day of travel woes.

That said, what are your thoughts on BlizzCon 2010? Were you
disappointed by the lack of massive announcements, or do you feel major
reveals are just icing on an otherwise perfect fan event cake? Let us
know in the
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=54328">Loading…
forum!

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the
Day

From our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3">Tavern
of the Ten Ton Hammer

href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=54231">If
I were a game developer, I would...

What
would you do if you could develope your own MMOG from the ground up?
What sort of game would you make? What sort of people would you hire to
make it? Go on--
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=54231">dream
big!

=====================================

Awesome
Quotes from the Epic Thread

"I
would hire a AAA PC MMO team and start working on the greatest mobile
MMORPG ever."

Our very own Sardu was in Anaheim this weekend for BlizzCon 2010 and
was there for the unveiling of the 5th Diablo character class, the
Demon Hunter. After the announcement he made his way over to the play
area to get a chance to test out this class hands on. What he found is
an interesting hybrid of a WoW rogue and hunter, yet something that
still retains its own unique identity within the D3 setting. Check out
his complete
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/diablo3/classes/preview/demonhunter">Hands-On
with the Diablo III Demon Hunter,
check out the screen shots, and then
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=54323">chime
in on the forums with your take
on the class.

A lot of new information comes out of
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/blizzcon/2010">BlizzCon
each year as we discover more and more about the changes coming soon to
a World
of Warcraft
near you. This year at the Raid and Dungeons Panel information on patch
4.1.0 was revealed along with the background on a lot of design
decisions in regards to instances. Want to know more about the raid
lockout in Cataclysm or the new dungeon maps? Come and read our
overview of the Dungeons and Raids panel and find out all the new info
fast.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/blizzcon/2010">BlizzCon
2010
kicked off with a Diablo III panel in which details about the
game's 5th class were revealed. But the panel also explored several
in-game features and offered a look at the newly announced PvP Battle
Arenas. Join Ten Ton Hammer's event coverage and find out what they had
to say.

BlizzCon
NEWS ROUNDUP

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/91135">
style="font-weight: bold;">Diablo III
Storage to be Shared Between Characters

Endless
possibilities! Countless combinations! But with great power, comes a
steep learning curve. In this article, we share some starter tips for
any budding LEGO craftsman, on best practices for starting down the
path to greatness when using the Brick Build interface in LEGO Universe.

EVE Online is a game driven by the diversity of its players and huge
corporations fighting for control of resources and territory. But what
happens when there is less diversity and those fiery conflicts become
little more than random shots across the bow? The Mittani explores this
dilemma in this week's Sins of a Solar Spymaster #53 - A Tripolar
Galaxy.

EVE Online has a complex meta-game that
can involve a great deal of trickery and deceit. For many people, it is
one of the game's best selling points. But how can a spy succeed in a
world full of paranoid corporation recruiters? In this guide, Ten Ton
Hammer contributing writer, Space Junkie, takes a look at some common
goals of spying, some simple techniques for infiltration, and a
selection of common mistakes.